Communicating Risks in Decision Support Systems - Conference Report

Risk analysis is an emerging field of research and relatively new in forestry. The international conference on 6-8 June 2018 in Solsona and Barcelona, Spain, focused on presenting models, methods and decision support systems that might be used by public administrators, forest owners and industry for forest management planning in a context of risk and uncertainty.The following report by Rasoul Yousefpour, Coordinator of IUFRO 4.04.07 Risk Analysis  was made available in the latest IUFRO News.

The following key issues were addressed at the conference in Spain:

• Aspects of risk analysis including sources of uncertainty in forest resource assessment, management, economics, and policy analysis.
• Risk analysis in adaptive forest management and methods to deal with risks
• Effects of uncertainty from different nature and level in decision making process
• Inclusion of risk and uncertainty in the DSS and application of practical guidelines for coping with the challenges in the real world applications
• Fire management in Catalonia and best management practices for an integrated landscape level fire management success.

Risk analysis is still poorly developed in the field of forestry and there is a huge demand to integrate, analyse, and manage risk and uncertainty in complex forestry systems. Learning from successful examples in other areas and fields may be helpful if approaches and methods are adapted carefully. A special issue publication in the ISI peer-reviewed journal Annals of Forest Science (deadline for submissions November 2018) is envisaged.

The conference was co-financed by the SuFoRun international R&D project (http://suforun.ctfc.cat/) and organized by Centre Tecnològic Forestal de Catalunya (CTFC, Spain) and IUFRO unit 4.04.07 and supported by IUFRO unit 4.04.04 - Sustainable forest management scheduling. In addition, Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo, researcher at the Centre Tecnològic Forestal de Catalunya CTFC, Solsona, Spain, and Deputy Coordinator of IUFRO unit 4.04.06 – Nature Conservation Planning belonged to both the organizing and scientific committees. It attracted 45 participants from Germany, Spain, France, Czech Republic, Latvia, UK, Denmark, Chile, Poland, Finland and Costa Rica.

Meeting website: http://suforun.ctfc.cat/june-2018-conference-solsona-and-barcelona-spain/